William James Seminar

In this seminar, we will be reading one book: The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (London & New York, 1902) the edited version of his Gifford Lecture Series on natural theology, delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902.

Many versions of the original text exist online. I will be using the original 1902 text in class for pagination. The thirty-eighth printing in 1935 was the last to use these plates. You can download a PDF of the 1902 version at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_James_The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience.pdf. The scan has a number of errors: one or two missing pages, some extra blank pages, and so on....but I think it's the best there is for now. In any case, even if you use another edition, you should be able to find your place as we read along.

William
Robertson Smith (1846-94) influenced Frazer's life work in a very practical
way.Smith was one of the chief editors
of the celebrated ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which
was being published in alphabetical order from 1875-1889.Smith met Frazer by the time they had reached
the letter 'T', a fateful letter in the anthropologist's dictionary.Brushing aside Frazer's objections that he
really didn't know anything about the subject, Smith assigned him to write the
articles on 'Taboo' and 'Totemism'.The
first article would be the embyronic draft of The Golden Bough; the
second for his two works on totemism, the last of which would inspire Freud to
make his own contribution to the field.

The Old
Testament was merely another source of ethnographic data for J.G. Frazer, and he was not
above making great leaps of logic on the basis of little hard exegetical
evidence.His discussion of the book of
Esther and the Jewish holiday of Purim in the second edition of The Golden Bough, published in 1900, for example, is stunning in its
wrong-headedness.According to Frazer,
the story is not that of Jews escaping mass murder in Persia, but rather yet
another middle eastern holiday of misrule, of Babylonian origin, based on
agricultural magic, and in its original form involving human sacrifice.Purim, he argued, began as the rite which ratified the
gods' approval for a king's rule for another year, a ritual which originally
had involved ritual murder, but which at some point made use of a mock king
instead.This explanation also solved
the meaning of the Passion narrative.Frazer claimed that at Purim the Jews would stage a Passion play
starring two prisoners who would play Haman (the mock king who is killed) and
Mordecai (the true king who is enthroned).Jesus, playing the part of Haman, was killed; Barabbas,appearing as Mordecai, was spared: even his
name has the ring of a role title.Frazer thought his theory solved the question of whether the pattern of
the dying/reviving god, common to the middle east, also existed in
Palestine.Most people thought not.Frazer, on the other hand, argued that Jesus
was included among the adherents of this motif, and was given the undesirable
role of Haman in the first place because his revolutionary preaching had
angered the wrong people.

Frazer's
reinterpretation of Purim and the Book of Esther quite naturally did not go
down well with either Christians or Jews.He knew that himself, and warned his good friend the rabbinical scholar
Solomon Schechter (1850-1915) that the second edition of his book would get him
into trouble everywhere.Reviews this
time were far more negative, not only from Jews like Chief Rabbi Moses Gaster
(1856-1939), but also from Andrew Lang (1844-1912), an important contemporary intellectual.Indeed, Lang's review was so severe that when
Frazer read it he had to quit writing and take a long holiday to recover from
the blow.

The third edition
of The Golden Bough (1911-15) repaired much of the damage, and
incorporated the development of his recent thinking, which was not nearly so
anti-religious.The first thing to go
was his interpretation of Purim, especially the claim that Jesus was crucified
while playing Haman in a Purimspiel.Frazer's main point in this flight of fancy had been to show that the
Palestinian Jews already had the motif of the dying and resurrected god, so it
was easy for them to accept the story of Jesus when it crystallized.Frazer also made it clear that he did not
think that Jesus was a mythical figure, and even compares him with
Muhammad.Jesus fit in well with
Frazer's notion of the great role that individuals had in history, in helping
mankind make the inevitable progression from magic to religion and finally to
science.'Quite apart from the positive
evidence of history and tradition,' he ruled, 'the origin of a great religious
and moral reform is inexplicable without the personal existence of a great
reformer.'But since Frazer never threw
anything out, he printed the Purim idea in an appendix, with some new
information that he had since acquired.